He sighed. She hoped he could feel the punch she intended.
“Look, little girl, I know what you’re doing, and I can’t lock you up.” He lifted his palms then dropped them at his side.
“Your mother must have told you how I feel. I know you don’t agree now, but I promise one day you’ll have some perspective. If you even waited a few weeks, you might see your old man knows what he’s talking about. I’m not the smartest man, but I’m not new to this world, Evelyn. I’ve sheltered you and your sister, so you think life starts and ends on Miro Street. You don’t know it’s only easy for you because I made it easy. A different kind of man might not.”
“He’s going to be a doctor just like you, Daddy,” Evelyn said, but her voice was shaking.
“He’s going to try to be a doctor,” her father corrected, “and Lord knows I want to see him succeed, but the odds are some obstacle is going to come along and trip him up. And it doesn’t mean he’s not a good man, it’s the world we’re living in, baby; it’s the world I want to protect you from.”
He reached for her hand, and she yanked it from him, dropped it on her own lap.
“I hear he’s going off to war, huh? Real heroic. Going off to fight somebody else’s battle when the real work could have been done here. Imagine how many lives he could have saved in New Orleans. I don’t just mean that literally. It does something to a young Negro boy to see me walk in his house to deliver his mama’s babies. I see it every time in their eyes, and it’s an awesome wonder to watch their pride develop inside.”
“He didn’t have a choice. He was drafted.”
She could hear her daddy’s soft chuckle, then out of the corner of her eye she saw the smirk.
“Oh, okay,” he said in a soft tone. “You’re right.”
But in his resignation, Evelyn understood that she was wrong. She remembered the conversation earlier that day in the alley; he hadn’t actually said he was drafted. She had just assumed that he was. But why would he volunteer? Of course she had heard of men who did, men who thought aligning themselves with this country would benefit them in some regard when they returned. Renard and Andrew had debated that very issue their first night over for dinner, but it had been Andrew who was promoting that angle. Renard, she thought, hadn’t agreed. At the heart of her shock of course was the fact that if he had volunteered—and her father’s tone had convinced her he had—he hadn’t discussed it with her first, and what did that say about his feelings for her? What did that say about the likelihood they would make it through this?
She put the matter out of her mind; she had so little time left with Renard and she didn’t want to squander it, but she hated her father just then for the very trait that typically endeared her to him, that he was always right, and her anger stripped her of anything else she might have said. She fumed inside, but she quivered too. If she were to speak, she didn’t know if she would strike him or cry out.
“You could have any boy in this neighborhood, in this country, I might dare to say. You have your whole life ahead of you. Who knows whom you’ll meet out there? You’re so young. You don’t know what it means to have choices. Don’t throw your life away over a low imagination.”
Low imagination, it might as well have been her nickname, she’d heard those words so often growing up, but never out of her father’s mouth. No, that was her mother’s expression for her, applied about once a week, usually after Evelyn said there were no groceries in the kitchen when there was rice, green beans, and salt pork. Or when she bought the beef the butcher offered her instead of demanding the choice cut. But this time her daddy had adopted his wife’s tool, kneaded it into Evelyn’s chest with his fingers.
Miss Georgia snuck out on her porch just then, and Daddy waved. Then he reached for Evelyn’s arm one more time. She made a show of refusing him so Miss Georgia could see it, and he sighed, tapped his cigar out, and walked back into the house.
Evelyn began pumping her legs harder. The cool wind slapped her face as she swung, and with each lift, she quieted inside. There was no more pretense. She would go to see Renard and stay out as long as she pleased, and everyone would know where she was, including Miss Georgia, who peeked out from behind her zinnias.
“It’s a beautiful day, little girl, isn’t it?” Miss Georgia called out, but Evelyn didn’t respond.
She just stared back without flinching; there were tears leaving her eyes, but she could hardly feel them.
It was harder to maintain her guard with Renard. He’d found a patch of grass across the street from the Sweet Tooth where they could sit, and he’d bought a bag of crawfish from Dufon’s, picked meat out for her the way her father always had, the juice of the heads trickling from his mouth. But she barely touched them.
“What’s wrong?” he repeated.
She shook her head each time. If she told him about her talk with her father, she’d have to share her father’s real opinion with him, and she didn’t want to offend him. He was already going through so much. He hadn’t mentioned his fear since the day he’d told her he was going to war, but she could hear it in his voice, too high-pitched, as he listed each sibling he had to visit, that he’d already seen half, that they all served gumbo, and he was so sick of okra he thought if he smelled it again, he might vomit.
He looked up from one of his stories, expecting her to laugh, and she tried to twist her mouth and her voice into something that might resemble that sound, but a cry escaped. It was in that moment that she let it all come out, every detail since the dinner that he thought had gone so well. She kept looking up at him as she spoke, oddly seeking the betrayal in his eyes so she could share the feeling with someone, but he only stared ahead nodding, his face as cold as stone.
When she was done, he didn’t say a word.
“I knew it was too good to be true,” he said finally.
“What’s that?”
“Your daddy’s approval. I believed it because I wanted to, but now that I think about it with a solid mind, I can see that it was all too good to be true.” He paused. “And I understand it. I mean if I had a daughter, I would want better for her too, better than a janitor’s son. My mother was a schoolteacher.”
He seemed to look up then for a glimpse of her approval, but there was none. Evelyn was as impressed as she would be by him already; he himself had been enough.
He lowered his eyes again. “But that was so long ago and I never met her. I was raised by a janitor and—”
He laughed, jarring only because it came out so authentic, the same sound he’d delivered when she’d told him stories about how long it took Ruby to get ready, or how Brother still begged for hog head cheese sandwiches.
“I had a teacher in the fifth grade,” he went on, “and he used to say to us, ‘Nobody’s going to get any free rides in this classroom. The last thing I’d want to do is deprive the world of a good garbageman.’” Renard laughed again, his eyes watering, his voice shaking out into a low-pitched dance. “I never thought he was talking to me.”
“He wasn’t talking to you,” Evelyn said.
Renard took his time answering. “Maybe. Maybe not. Either way. I just want to enjoy these moments with you.” He pulled her to him, and she relented, but she held her head away from his chest.
She tried to relax, but she couldn’t go with it. “I don’t like to hear you talk about yourself that way, what you were saying about the janitor and the garbageman,” she said.
“Aw, I’m just talking, Evelyn, you don’t have to worry about it. I know who I am. I’m just sad, that’s all. It’s been a rough week.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She leaned closer into him now. “Well, Renard, I haven’t known you long, but I know you well, and the man I fell in love with is a fighter. He wouldn’t let somebody else define him one way or the other. He wouldn’t give up hope, not now, not when
he needed it more than ever.”
“Look, if I can get myself back here in one piece, you won’t have to worry about me one way or another, I promise you that.”
“That’s what I mean. Not if.”
“What?”
“Not if, when. Just decide right here and right now that you’re coming back.”
He looked at her as if she had become something foreign to him.
“That’s not something I can decide.”
“It is,” she said. She almost quoted her daddy again but remembered it was the Bible she was remembering. “As a man thinketh, so is he,” she said.
He nodded. “That was one of my mama’s favorite scriptures. They tell me, she knitted it into a pillow, she loved it so. I still have that pillow. When I get back, I’ll give it to you.”
Evelyn sat up, her body stiffening with excitement. “That’s what I mean, baby. You said when. Not if, but when.” She beamed.
“Well, if anything would get me back here, it’s you.”
“What about me?” She smiled.
He traced his fingers alongside the edge of her bra strap. She leaned into him to kiss his neck. Every day since the news of the draft,
they’d gone further than the day before. The night before she had allowed him to rub the outside of her panties, and she’d had to rinse them out when she got home and hang them over the tub. As far as what was coming, she couldn’t say. She always thought she’d wait until marriage, but now that he was leaving, the order of things that had been pumped into her since birth seemed to fold into itself, and she thought this new version of her might be a product of the times, refined under the severity of them, whetted and changed.
“Those eyes, those lips,” he answered. “Kissing them is making me want to put my mouth all over you, baby.”
She moaned, moving onto his lap.
“Andrew said I could borrow his car,” he said. “I could come by and get you. Would that be something you would like?” His voice had softened into a fraction of itself she hadn’t been privy to before. She could feel him pounding against her, the intensity matching the ardor of her heart. She nodded. She lingered for a while on top, shifting herself against his pants until he said he couldn’t take anymore. When they stood to leave, she looked up at him.
“Why’d you do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Why’d you volunteer?”
He shook his head, sighed, shrugged. “They said they would pay for my schooling. Andrew’s mama can’t pay anymore, and I promised myself I would finish, no matter what. What other option did I have, work at Todd’s for the rest of my life, saying ‘Yessir’ to the manager with my eyes on my shoes, pay officers half my pay just so they’ll leave me be?” He paused, looked at her, his brown eyes shining. “It’s no way to live, but I could have survived it if I hadn’t met you. I want better for you; I want better for us.”
Evelyn remembered the episode she witnessed between him and the officer and felt guilty she’d even questioned him. She pulled him to her. “But you don’t agree with Andrew, all those lies he spouted, about it being our duty, about it demanding equality. You told Daddy you didn’t agree.”
“I didn’t know what I thought. I didn’t say one way or another. I only spoke about the matters that felt true to me, but listening to Andrew more, I don’t know. I wonder if this is our ticket to full manhood in this country. Maybe if not for me, for my children.”
When Evelyn got home, Ruby was lying facedown in bed, flipping through one of Mother’s old issues of Life magazine.
Evelyn sat down beside her. “Shouldn’t you be with Andrew?” she asked.
“Hmph, I’m not married just yet, you know. I do have my own life. Anyway,” she went on, “he’s with his family. Normally he asks me to go with them, but these are difficult circumstances, now aren’t they?”
Evelyn smiled. She had been glad for some distance between her and her sister, but she had missed her too. She rested her head on her back.
“What’s gotten into you?” Ruby asked, trying to scoot over but failing.
“Can’t I spend time with my sister without causing alarm?”
“Hmph. You haven’t said two words to me in a month, now you’re laying all on me like it’s not one hundred degrees in this house. Girl, it’s too hot for all that.”
Evelyn sat up, still smiling though. Her sister had turned back to the magazine, but Evelyn could tell she was smiling too.
Evelyn bent over and reached for Ruby’s waist. Their whole childhood, she’d known just where to tickle her. When Ruby was in a bad mood, Evelyn would grab her around the middle, the palms of her feet or under her arms. Her sister would laugh and laugh until spit trickled down her chin, then she’d beg for Evelyn to stop in grunts more than words. This time was the same. They both laughed until tears formed, and Ruby called out, “Girl, you’re crazy. I do believe Renard is running you clear out of your mind.”
Evelyn conjured her sister that night. She wondered if without knowing it that had been why she’d needed to be so close to Ruby, to sit on her bed, to smell the perfume she sprayed on her wrists and between her legs. Ruby had never confessed to the things she’d done with men, but Evelyn could infer it from her guarded diary entries, the smug looks her sister shot her some mornings, and maybe connecting with her that day had been preparation for now, when she said words so dirty she didn’t know they were inside her, when she climbed on top of Renard and growled like a dog, when she touched herself and moaned like she was possessed.
It was her imagination of how aroused he must have been that aroused her in return. By the time he was inside her, she was so slick, it didn’t hurt as much as she’d feared it might, and though she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out, she clung to him and begged him not to leave her.
Renard had been gone two months when Evelyn learned she was pregnant. She sat on the information as long as she could. She had been forced to share so much with her family for so long, considering such a supremely important matter in private replenished her. Otherwise, her house felt as if it might break under the weight of its own gloom: Her parents hadn’t spoken to each other much since Daddy and Mother’s disagreement about Renard; Ruby stopped eating once Andrew left; Brother stayed out; Mother prayed the Rosary; and Evelyn’s loneliness was fiercer than she’d ever known.
She filled her days with the same few questions, reshuffled so it seemed to her mind she was putting it to use. What was Renard doing over there in another continent? Was he safe? Would he return? When? Would he want her once he was back? And that last question slipped in not because of her new condition, which wasn’t altogether real to her, but because his absence had dulled time’s sharp edges. She felt as if the last few months had been years. Her feelings were the same, but she had scarcely left the house she’d lived in when they’d fallen in love. He wasn’t off on a European vacation, but surely there were peaks beneath the cloak of war too; there were new faces to learn and places to discover. In her most desperate and selfish times she wondered if he even thought about her.
Meanwhile, she barely had the stamina to check the mail, and all the energy she’d spent pouring into memorizations and recitations drained out of her. She found herself sleeping through classes, coming home to eat, then retiring to her room for more sleeping. She’d attempt to do her homework in the beginning, but after a few days of lapses there seemed to be so much of it, and the parts of her mind she might have used to tackle it before seemed bent or dull, no longer available for use.
Still, despite the vague knowledge that her life as she knew it was slipping away, she was surprised when the president called her into his office and asked her to take a leave of absence. Disrupted from a routine, but oddly not devastated, Evelyn still pretended to attend. She’d wake up in the morning at the same time as she always did and walk with Ruby until she arrived at he
r sister’s vocational school, then she’d turn at the next block—where she would have gone straight before to her own campus—and head over to the Sweet Tooth for apple pie. She physically craved ice cream, but something in her mind wouldn’t allow it, and she was grateful for that, afraid of what the memory of the smell might do to her insides. She had managed to avoid crying, and she wanted to keep it that way.
One day when she returned home at the time she would have if she were still a student, her brother passed her an envelope postmarked from France. She locked herself in the bathroom and tore it open before she could sit. She read the last paragraph first, knowing everything important about a beginning could be gleaned from its ending. Renard had signed it with the words, “Everything my heart could give.” Her legs gave way and she sank onto the bathroom floor. Once she had read it all the way through, she turned back to start over from the beginning.
He was fine, he said. And he’d heard that Andrew was too. He drove the same route every day, carrying gas, oil, and food between the beachhead and the city of Chartres, just outside Paris. They had met nice men, some of the nicest men he’d ever known, and he spent a lot of time with them, talking, playing cards, and bragging about their women. Everyone pretended they had each other beat, but several of the guys had taken him aside and told him he sure was a lucky nigger. He kept a picture she’d given him above his bed at night to make sure she was his first and last thought on both ends of the day. He didn’t know when he was coming home, but he’d know soon, and he’d write her when he did. “Don’t worry about anything, I’m safe, and I’m yours” was the last line, and Evelyn turned it over and over in her mind until she had drained it of all its magic.
The note not only fueled her love for Renard, it bred her confidence that when he returned they’d start their life together.
So she rubbed her stomach with cocoa butter not because it would prevent stretch marks, but because she wanted her child to know she’d been cooed over. She ate two portions of the breakfast sausage Ruby had forsaken. And she considered names like Sybil or Jacqueline, the latter the name of one of the girls at Dillard who without Evelyn present would surely finish first in their class.
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